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In the Spotlight

Our Spring 2018 Season

Poets House, the nation’s poetry library celebrates three decades as a home for poetry, offering programs featuring some of the world’s premier poets—Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, emerging talents, and leading voices from diverse cultures around the globe.

Our 30th Anniversary programs include: close readings of 30 seminal poems by a diverse roster of innovative poets (six poets x five poems each = 30 poems). Rigoberto González, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Poetry, considers five poems that explore the city—as the symbol of order and chaos, progress and decay, community and overcrowding on March 24. Poet, organizer and critic Erica Hunt considers how five poems frame time: tense, tempo, slippage, archive, and prophecy on April 14. Carl Phillips, author of over a dozen books of poetry and winner of many awards, discusses how pattern makes meaning in five poems on April 21. MacArthur Award winner Edward Hirsch considers how five 19th- and 20th-century poets treat luminous moments and visionary experiences on May 12.

We also present our exhibition 30 Years! A Narrative in 30 Objects, displaying rare books, papers, photographs and artwork that reveal the network of poetic and artistic alliances that built Poets House, including handwritten correspondence between E.E. Cummings and Elizabeth Kray, typescripts from Stanley Kunitz and Galway Kinnell, and much more. On view through May 12, 2018.

Exhibition

30 Years! A Narrative in 30 Objects
In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Poets House, 30 Years! A Narrative in 30 Objects mines the Poets House archives for objects of resonance, including handwritten correspondence between E. E. Cummings and Elizabeth Kray; typescripts from Stanley Kunitz and Galway Kinnell; paintings, photographs, journals, and recordings; and much more.
Exhibition on view through May 12, 2018

"5x5" from the Poets House Showcase

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Poets House Showcase, Poets House is pleased to co-sponsor with Verse a series of curated book selections from the exhibit by prominent poets. An exciting annual exhibition, the Showcase gathers poetry books and press ephemera from the past year, boasting over 3,600 titles from 750 publishers. We are pleased offer a "5X5"—5 book recommendations each from poets Lynn Melnick, Paolo Javier, Kyle Dacuyan, sam sax, and aziza barnes — in celebration of the twenty-fifth Annual Showcase and the breadth of contemporary poetry it encompasses. Click here to read "5x5"

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